Original subtitles

This programme contains strong language and adult themes.

How well do you actually know your neighbour, your friend?

How well do we know anybody, really?

I'd never met anyone like her, to be honest with you.

Everything about her was just so over the top.

It was all an illusion.

Everything we thought we knew turned out to be lies.

Because to keep a secret, I could never keep a secret like that.

It just seemed surreal.

Just because someone comes across as eccentric,

it doesn't mean that they're instantly a murderer.

But I suppose you never know what goes on behind closed doors, do you?

TV: "See you after that. Thank you, ladies.

"More from them in an hour's time."

So, Beddau, a lot of people mispronounce it.

People say, "Beydah."

Like, that's not how you pronounce Beddau. "Bedoo."Bedow."

Obviously, I suppose, you've got to have a little bit of Welsh in you.

Double D is "th" in Welsh.

And it's "Bather," short, not "Bathe-eye."

It's a very typical Welsh village.

Quiet, off-the-map sort of place.

Unless you really knew what Beddau was,

you wouldn't have any reason to come through or visit it.

OK. You ready to play bingo?

There is this sense of community and people looking out for each other.

You were naughty. Yes, but you were naughty.

If we've got a problem, we talk about it.

Stop it, Mary. Right, OK.

If something happens in Beddau, everybody gets to know about it.

I was working in the station on the computer.

Gareth came in and said...

I had a strange phone call off the housing officer,

saying, "One of the tenants in Beddau had just found a body,

"but don't panic because I don't think it's a dead body,

"I think it's a load of rubbish. We'll have our lunch first."

I just immediately got up from my desk and said,

"Look, you know, we can't just leave this till you have dinner.

(CHUCKLES) "We may have a crime scene. We need to go now."

There's the entrance to the flats,

and you can go right through to the garden at the back.

I found it... lying on the floor here.

So, just tucked up against the wall on the gravel.

To me, it looked like somebody had left a roll of plastic there.

There'd been a couple of ladies who had found this object in the garden.

A lady called Michelle.

And her friend Rhian had also been with her in the morning.

My name is Rhian Lee.

I've lived in Beddau for the last 26 years.

In the morning, I went over to Michelle's for a cuppa,

and we thought, for a laugh...

we'd play a prank.

Michelle knew about this packet in the garden.

She said it was this medical skeleton

wrapped up in, like, a big package.

So, we thought we'd bring it in,

put it on the settee,

and we were gonna knock the ceiling for the neighbour to come down,

just to play a prank, a joke.

Michelle would do anything for a laugh. A bit of a joker.

Michelle told me then that she had thought

that it was a medical skeleton,

and it was Rhian and Michelle then started to cut through the plastic.

Michelle was going like that while I was cutting it.

She got fluidy stuff all over her hands.

She says, "It's a dead body, it's a dead body."

I said, "Don't be so stupid. It's not a dead body."

I said, "Phone the police. Phone the police."

When she told me this,

I didn't know what to think. I didn't know

whether to believe Michelle and Rhian, or what.

We need to find out if it's a dead body, or is it a medical skeleton?

We'll cut it open to have a look.

Gareth come back with a Stanley knife just to try and make a clean cut.

So, very, very difficult to cut through.

As you go deeper and deeper, I think it was a bit of carpet.

And there was a little, sort of, brown... sludge coming out of it

And then other plastic wrappings.

The sludge was getting thicker.

Six to eight inches, that's how thick the layers were.

The smell was just overwhelming,

so it obviously wasn't a medical skeleton.

I looked over and you could see, it looked like matted hair.

You step back a bit then.

It was clear to us, it was a body inside this bag.

A dead body. We'd just found a dead body in Beddau.

Certainly wasn't something I thought I'd see

that day, when I went into work.

None of us could believe what we had found.

Straightaway we got on the radio and contacted the control room to say,

"We need the Scenes Of Crime officers to come here immediately."

Somebody had put up on Facebook,

something's happened at Trem-y-Cwm.

You know, a lot of police there.

Every man and his dog wanted to find out what's happening.

Could you say rubbernecking? Yeah, you could.

I pulled up to the block of flats,

and I noticed two police officers at the main entrance of the door.

My friend Michelle lived there.

My heart is racing nine to the dozen.

Well, what could it be?

The thing is, the white tent goes up,

so immediately people know that something has happened.

My mum lived in the flats in Trem-y-Cwm,

and I went in and said, "Mum, what's going on?"

"They've found a body." I said, "Don't be so stupid.

"How long has it been there?"

"I don't know. I've just heard the rumours outside."

That's the first I heard of it.

"In other news, police say a body found

"behind a block of flats in Beddau. It was wrapped in plastic.

"A murder investigation has been launched

"as police try to establish the identity of the remains."

In 2015, I was Detective Chief Inspector

working in the Major Crime Investigation Division.

There hadn't been a murder in Beddau for almost 20 years.

First thoughts were: "Who is this person? Who last saw them alive?"

We had search teams in the garden, looking for any weapons, any clues,

anything alien to that scene.

The garden belonged to the four flats.

The entrance to the garden was through the communal hall.

There was a gate on the side, but the gate was padlocked.

My thoughts were, "Well, if the gate's locked,

"then they've either had to put the body through the communal hall.

"Or the person who's done it has the key for the gate and can open it."

The only other way it could have got there would have been

throwing it over the gate.

We spoke to the occupants of those flats.

But no-one had any recollection

of seeing that package in the garden.

You've got a body lying in a garden in Beddau.

You don't know who the person is,

you don't know who's responsible,

and, potentially, you've got a killer on the loose.

It got people worried,

thinking somebody had come into the village.

People were on edge. I mean, when you get things like that

happen in a small place, it's...

it does send shivers down your spine.

How could this happen in a small community

where everybody knows everybody?

A lot of people I know don't lock their doors

because they do feel safe in Beddau.

You know, you do look at your neighbours then,

and you think, "Hang on now, erm, how long have they lived here?"

One of our fast track inquiries,

you look at missing person reports. Who from the area is missing?

There were no live missing person reports.

Had there been any disturbances recently in the area?

But there was nothing.

It was like a body had just fallen out of the sky

and landed in a garden in Beddau.

"Police say that the body, which has not been identified yet,

"was concealed above ground.

"The scene is being preserved to see if there are any clues

"either to the identity of the body, or how it came to be there."

It was genuine concern for who it was,

cos it's somebody's daughter, son, mother, father.

It could be somebody who, who never had anybody to take care of them.

There's two sides to Beddau.

There's the warmth and the spirit of the community,

and then there's the deeper, darker underbelly

that lays in unemployment and drug use.

Beddau was for a very long time a very established mining village.

And during that time, everybody sort of knew their roles.

When the mines were closed and the coke works closed,

the fabric of the community changed.

The land still bears the scars.

People's hearts still bear those scars, you know,

where the industry was taken out of it.

Times change, and I think a lot of people take drugs in Beddau,

and we thought perhaps somebody had taken an overdose.

I mean, you used to have, when we were younger,

a lot of people who were drug users would hang underneath it,

so, the only things you would, sort of, think at this point

was somebody old passed away, or had somebody had an overdose?

But it came out then that it was a body and it had been wrapped up.

What the heck has gone on, then?

Your mind is trying to reconcile, "Well, what could've happened?"

The packaging was extraordinary.

There'd been 14 large ground sheets used to wrap the body.

That body had been wrapped some 41 times.

This was a male.

He was white, receding hair.

He was around five foot, six inches tall, middle aged.

He had a gold signet ring on one of his fingers.

The body was in really good condition.

You know, there was skin, there was hair,

the organs were intact.

There were no maggots.

The pathologist had dated the body as potentially weeks,

maybe months, could be longer, depending on storage conditions.

This body is probably recent.

And the cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head.

The victim had a fracture to the skull,

he had a fracture to the eye socket.

It was quite clear this was a homicide investigation.

TV: "Officers confirmed that they've launched a murder investigation,

and it wasn't what people living

"near the Trem-y-Cwm flats expected to hear."

"Didn't think it would happen around here. It's on your doorstep."

"Quite scared, actually."

"Police say a priority is to identify the person

"and find out how they died.

"They want to speak to anyone who may have information."

The early lines of inquiry are just looking

at the residents of the four flats.

There was an elderly lady on the ground floor.

She was 93. Rarely left her flat.

She would absolutely have had, categorically have had,

nothing to do with... with anything that went on there.

We spoke to the gentleman who lived in the flat upstairs

who had, you know, vulnerability issues.

He'd only recently, and very recently, just moved into that flat,

and wasn't capable of being involved in it in any way, really.

One of the flats was empty.

The lady who led in that flat, she'd been seriously ill with cancer,

and she'd died, er, October that year.

But there was nothing. There was no-one had had any knowledge

of that package, er, other than Michelle James.

Michelle was a priority witness because

she was the person that had gone to the package and suspected there

to be a skeleton in there.

So, we took Michelle James to the station

and over the next few days, a series of interviews took place

which were recorded.

There was a couple of things I was querying.

Why has she gone to this package?

Why did she think there was a skeleton in there?

Who had told her it was there? How long had she known it was there?

Michelle's account was that her neighbour, Leigh Sabine,

who'd died recently, who used to live in the flat, number 57,

just above Michelle, owned this medical skeleton

which she believed to have been in that package in the garden.

We needed to find out, who was Leigh Sabine?

I was tasked to carry out house-to-house enquiries,

find out as much information as I could about Leigh Sabine.

For me personally, having, sort of, gone to school in the area

and know the people who live in the area,

it's really important that we find who was she,

where was she from, does she have any family?

When I first met Leigh Sabine,

she gave me the impression of a lady

who was a very well-dressed lady, back in the day.

But she still wanted to keep that look,

with her red nails,

her lipstick.

First impressions when she walks in?

Off her trolley. She was just crazy, very eccentric.

She would just waltz in the door. "Hello my darlings.

"Put the fucking kettle on, will you?"

God, who is this lady?

When she first turned up in Beddau, for a woman in her early 60s,

she was wearing denim shorts and fishnet tights,

which isn't usual.

I asked her about this once, and she said,

"Well, I like to be noticed, darling."

The impression she gave me was being very gypsy-ish,

if that's the right word to use.

She had like a..

I don't mean this disrespectful to gypsies,

but she had that sort of character.

She wasn't like a gypsy, a hippie.

Hip... That's the word - hippy.

Yeah, it was very hippy-ish, type of thing, yeah.

A child of the '60s. That's the way to describe it. You're right, yeah.

She loved singing, and that was her passion.

She said she sang in many cabarets.

"Oh, darling, darling!

"You should have seen me on the stage. I was amazing."

"Don't just be the art, darling, you are the art."

Or, "Don't just live art, you are art".

So grander than life.

It had to be, "Oh, darling!"

With her cigarette hanging out.

That is Leigh. Yeah?

Did I do it right, Leigh?

The problem was, she'd been ill for quite some time, about a year.

She was terminally diagnosed with brain cancer,

but also she had died about a month earlier.

And that body was reasonably fresh,

and that fact that she had been ill,

I think, for up to 12 months prior to her passing away,

would she even be capable of committing such a crime?

How could she have moved a body? How could she have killed someone?

It just didn't make any sense to us.

So, Michelle's account about her neighbour, Leigh Sabine,

sounded far-fetched.

From our perspective, Michelle's story was somewhat confusing.

For example, she mentioned issues with an ex-partner.

I remember while speaking to Michelle at the crime scene,

she starts telling me that she'd been teasing another tenant at the flat,

saying that it was actually the body of her ex-husband

and she'd been using parts of it

to make a stew that she'd been feeding him in the week.

There was a number of little things she was saying

which were really troubling me.

Michelle James gave different accounts

as to when she'd actually become aware of the package in the garden,

initially stating it was a week ago,

and then subsequently saying it was when the body was discovered.

So, all of those things together,

with the perceived joke about her turning her partner into stew,

really caused us some concern.

We stopped that interview as a witness.

I made the decision to arrest her.

"South Wales Police have confirmed

"that a 45-year-old woman from Beddau

"was arrested on suspicion of murder."

Someone from within the village has been arrested for a murder.

That was a major shock to us.

When I heard that Michelle was arrested I said, "Oh, shit."

I mean, how could you be arrested on suspicion of murder?

It's just crazy. It's just absolute craziness.

Rhian rang me, and said, "Lynne, Michelle has been arrested."

And I'm, like, "Whoa, hang on, now.

"There is no way she would hurt anybody."

The police, I know they've got to do their job,

and I totally understand that,

and they want answers, but so did we want answers.

But then there was, I suppose, relief,

in as much that, well, at least they've got the murderer.

Michelle James' ex-partner was male, white.

He was around 42years of age, which matched the body.

It was important that we traced him as soon as we could.

But we couldn't find him.

So, when Michelle was in custody, we went to search her flat.

We were looking for anything, really,

which would connect her to this crime.

What we did find was some blood staining on her mattress.

So that had to be sent off to be compared to the DNA from the victim.

Whilst I was waiting for the DNA testing,

we were gathering any CCTV evidence near to the scene.

We're looking for a car pulling up

and putting that package over the wall,

or Michelle James actually depositing the package.

There was nothing overlooking that garden.

Just general, day to day life,

which... It... It wasn't any use.

The DNA took a couple of days to come back

from the blood on Michelle James' mattress.

That DNA was linked to her ex-boyfriend,

but his DNA didn't match the of the victim.

We subsequently traced her ex-boyfriend,

who'd been staying with his mother.

The ex-boyfriend was clearly not the victim who was within the packaging.

So, after that first 48 hours Michelle James was released from custody.

Michelle James had clearly gone through an ordeal

because she was hundred percent innocent.

We've got no identity of a victim. The DNA wasn't on the database.

We always look at the dental work, but we had nothing to compare to,

so we couldn't identify this person through dental records.

We'd got no CCTV evidence.

We've recovered no weapons that match the injuries on the body,

and we're really back to square one.

TV: "In the small garden behind the Beddau flats,

"Michelle James told me today about how she found the remains

"and how she feels she'll never get over the shock."

I think this block should be smashed to the ground.

Cos I don't think anyone would want to live here

after what's gone on here.

So, it really affected Michelle.

People in the area were calling her a murderer.

It was just crazy.

They put two and two together and made six.

I totally felt devastated for her.

I thought that was a medical skeleton.

That's what we was all told, it was meds... a skeleton,

and that's what we all thought.

But, obviously, now everybody has found out different.

When Michelle was released,

we were discussing what was asked, and what was said,

and she, basically, said,

"I told the police, Lynne,

"not once, not twice, many occasions,

"that this skeleton was from a lady who had just died

"and we hadn't long buried her."

And that lady was Leigh Sabine.

So, the garden where the body was found belonged to the four flats.

Whilst it was shared, it was really under the ownership

and care of Leigh Sabine.

She had been responsible for it for many years,

even to the point where she'd presented it so well

that a local magazine had done a feature article on it

some three years earlier.

"Coming from New Zealand, I've grown up with dirt", Leigh explains.

"I love being outside and I'd rather be mucking around in the garden

"than sat in front of the television.

"I do really love living in Beddau and feel part of the community.

"It's a special place, but when I first arrived 16 years ago,

"nobody was doing anything in the garden.

"It looked pathetic and neglected."

Apart from the piece in the magazine,

there was very little known about her at all,

in terms of formal official records.

She had been arrested for shoplifting some years previously,

but that had been no further action in court.

We weren't really clear where she'd lived,

who she'd been married to, or where she'd grown up.

When I was carrying out my house-to-house enquires,

as I spoke to people about Leigh Sabine,

things started seeming off.

Every resident I spoke to,

they all had a slightly different take on who this Leigh Sabine was.

I thought she was a nurse.

"I used to be a nurse, you see, darling." (LAUGHS)

She was apparently this very famous cabaret singer, dancer in her day.

She said she travelled. She had loads of dogs.

She was a breeder at one stage.

Leigh was a drugs counsellor, first and foremost.

You name it, and it sounded like she'd done it.

Nobody could agree on what Leigh did for a living,

but also where she was from.

She had a very strange accent.

You know, when somebody's trying to talk quite posh, and they're not.

Cos I actually thought she was from South Africa.

I thought she was from New Zealand.

There was a slight bit of New Zealand accent,

but that wasn't the strongest accent.

My son's mother-in-law is a Kiwi.

It was an authentic accent.

Yeah, I wouldn't say it was a foreign accent,

but it wasn't Welsh and it wasn't English.

It sounded put on.

Some said she was from Australia, some said she was from New Zealand.

Other people said that she was from Reading.

Something was off with this character.

Leigh was always talking about a medical skeleton.

Personally, myself, I never seen the skeleton.

On numerous occasions, she wanted it moved,

and I would be, like,

"Oh, gosh, I really haven't got time to do things like that."

She'd asked my oldest son

if he could move it from outside and put it up in the attic,

but he was busy in work.

We were sitting around the table, having a cup of tea,

and she mentioned the skeleton again,

and I went, "Well, I hope it's not a bleeding real one," I said.

And she went,

"You never know, Lynne," pointing that lovely red nail.

So, speaking to all the different witnesses,

and people who knew Leigh,

I learnt that one of her friends was Mary West.

Now, Mary West used to be my teacher.

I had a phone call from an ex-pupil of mine,

a detective, saying...

"Mrs West, I need you to come to the police station to have a chat."

And I said, "Well, I'm, you know, I'm busy this evening."

Then he said, "Well, it is a murder inquiry, Mrs West,

"so you'd better come down."

Seemed very strange having to get my teacher to toe the line.

Matthew asked me to go into how I knew her, so I explained.

I was first aware of Leigh in 2002,

when my mother moved into that flat.

She started saying,

"Now there's this very eccentric lady from New Zealand there."

I got to know Leigh more during 2014,

when my mother was ill.

Leigh would sit with her

and chat to her, and she also used to ring my mother up

every morning, and say, "I just called to say I love you."

We were appreciate of it, of the support Leigh gave us,

but then I heard from somebody that she had been taken into hospital.

It became evident from 2014 Leigh had terminal cancer.

We managed to get her into Y Bwthyn hospital, which is end of life.

I went up there and I held her hand until she took her last breath.

She died about a month before the body was found.

Ordinarily, we'd speak to family, but there was no family,

according to the community.

After she died, I had to register the death.

We were looking for paperwork.

We just found these two passports,

and the one passport was John Sabine.

He was down as a contact.

I'd never met John Sabine, but I knew because she'd told me

that he was her ex-husband.

Through speaking to Mary and Lynne, we established

that Leigh Sabine had a husband called John Sabine,

but there was no trace of this John Sabine.

So, John Sabine's name came up on the voters' register,

but there was no record of him living there, which was odd.

When we dug into that, then we found him on the tenancy agreement.

She'd moved in with her husband, February, 1997.

A number of members of the community were telling us that,

whilst they'd never seen John Sabine,

that Leigh had told them that she had been married,

she had led with him.

We would sit and chat, and I was interested. I said, you know,

"Oh, what happened to John?"

"Oh, he left me," she said,

"He left me for another woman.

"Cos he's Italian, you know, that's what they do."

We knew that she had been married, obviously, and that he'd left her.

I can remember her talking about an abusive husband. Yeah.

I can't remember exactly what she used to say,

but I can remember a conversation around that.

She'd go, "Pff!" It was more like it was just good riddance.

She told my mother that her husband had left her,

and that he'd left her quite destitute.

Strangely, when, the first night,

I brought her home from hospital, I helped her undress

and she handed me

her, er, breast implants

because she'd had a double mastectomy.

And she said, "This is why he left me.

"He said he didn't want to live with a hermaphrodite."

So, you know, I didn't ask any more questions.

A number of members of the community told us

that he'd, you know, run off with another woman.

He'd gone to live in Newcastle.

But there was no trace of this John Sabine.

It did start to prickle my mind

that John Sabine could potentially be the body in the bag.

When I was interviewed by Matt Phillips,

he said to me that, erm,

they thought that it could be John Sabine

that they'd found and I said, "Well, it can't possibly be John Sabine

"because I found the record of his death."

When Leigh died, I went to register the death.

And they said, "Was she a widow or divorcee?"

And I said, "I think she was a divorcee."

And they said, "Well, if you'd go and check on the records."

And I've done quite a bit of family history,

so I know where you need to look.

I found a match for John Charles Sabine.

Born in 1929,

and then the death was registered in Essex in 2001.

Mary West presented us with, er, the death certificate for John Sabine,

who'd actually died, er, or been buried in Essex in 2001.

Her husband died years ago,

so there's no way it could be her husband.

We had no real positive leads at this time,

but there was just something wasn't sitting right with me.

Leigh Sabine had led at 57, Trem-y-Cwm since 1997.

Her flat had been vacant since her death

on the 30th of October that year.

I just sent detectives to just do an assessment of her premises,

just to look for any clues, anything that could take us forward.

So, when detectives entered the flat,

what they found was it had actually been stripped bare,

even down to the carpets,

which had been taken from the property, which did surprise me.

After Leigh had passed,

we knew we only had a few weeks to clear out her flat.

I said to any of the girls,

"If you want anything, just take it. Help yourselves."

Michelle, she had a frog, which was a weight for a door.

I had the Hoover, Rhian had some jewellery.

There was an awful lot of tatty bits

like hair straighteners I never used. They went in the bin.

We deep cleaned it all. It was spotless. It was immaculate.

Because Lynne had a cleaning company,

she deep cleaned the flat,

but we didn't realise that two weeks later

it would become a potential crime scene.

It was disappointing.

The only things that were left, really,

was some miscellaneous items, some boxes,

lots of rubbish, broken ornaments.

But there was one photograph, which had been ripped up into pieces.

And when we put that back together,

there was a photo of a man.

Written on the back was, "Derek. The man I truly did love."

Who's Derek?

Is Derek the person that's lying in the bag?

It was really important that we found out who he was,

and what his relationship was to Leigh.

She loved men.

Oh, she loved it.

Her male attention, oh, yes.

Men. Well, she would just pounce.

Three days before she died,

she tried to snog the oncologist in the hospice

when he went to adjust her syringe driver.

So, I was thinking, "Oh my God." You know,

"This is slightly embarrassing," but it was, like, he's a man.

You know, "Here I am." You know, it was the way she was with all men.

Perhaps she'd come in the salon and, you know, if there was a gent there,

and she thought he was nice, she would make it clear. (LAUGHS)

She did love having many male company in her flat.

There was a kerfuffle going on outside the Spar

because some lady had got on to her, I think,

because she'd been having an affair with her husband.

Each to their own, isn't it? You know?

My mother sometimes used to say about Leigh,

"Oh, she's got another man now.

"She's got Derek Ellis living there with her."

I think her and that Derek had a few fiery arguments.

They were off, they were back on together, then they were off,

then they were back on together.

So, the community were telling us that the relationship

between Leigh Sabine and Derek Ellis was quite volatile.

Leigh and Derek used to go to,

I think it was the Welfare they used to go to,

and they would often get drunk and then come back and argue.

We were able to trace some family members, including his daughter.

We were able to establish

that Derek Ellis had sadly passed away in 2010 of liver disease.

So, it was clear that he couldn't have been the victim.

We were back to square one.

I've dealt and worked on a lot of homicide investigations

and never come across one like this.

Normally, within the first hour, you usually know who your victim is,

and you've really got a clear starting point.

In this case, we talk about it being a whodunnit.

It was very much a who is it?

Every time we thought we were on to something,

we'd pull a thread, and it wouldn't go anywhere,

so, it was very frustrating.

In some ways, when you spoke to Leigh,

she seemed quite open about her life.

She would sort of give you snapshots of it.

Before Leigh died,

in the September of 2014 it was my mother's 80th birthday,

so we'd organised a party for her.

Now, I'm the oldest of five children,

and we invited Leigh to come to the party.

I can remember her saying,

"There's such a lovely atmosphere of warmth here."

And then she told me that she had five children.

I was... just...

I don't think shocked, just really bemused by it all.

I just thought, "What is going on here?"

Not once did she ever mention the children. Nothing.

It was a fairly big fact to omit.

It just seemed surreal to hide a secret like that.

There were no photos at all in the house of children.

She had no family photographs in her flat at all.

The first time we met her, she gave us her life story in ten minutes,

but never did she mention children.

Why not mention that you've got five children?

My name's Leigh Ann Sabine. I'm the youngest of five children.

My name is Steve Sabine.

I've never, ever told my story because people don't believe it.

Would you like your fucking family destroyed, buddy?

My name is Jane Sabine.

I am the second youngest daughter

of Leigh and John Sabine.

We've come all the way from Sydney to get two sides of the story.

Well, you should have phoned.

I have no doubt my mother was capable...

.. of murder.

Subtitles by Sky Access Services www.skyaccessibility.sky